When I first gave thought to this question, I thought the answer was financial independence—that it must have been in October when I got my first paycheck as a lawyer and paid my first month of rent on my own without my parents’ help. But then I thought no, it was actually a few months before that. I was up late at night studying for the New York Bar Exam when a mouse appeared from behind my trash can.

I screamed, as one does. As if in a cartoon, the mouse screamed back, jumped, and ran back behind the trash can. I wasn’t sure what to do.

I was standing on my couch afraid to step on the floor for about ten minutes. Finally, at 1 AM, I jumped from the couch, grabbed my phone, and called my parents, who live in North Carolina and could do absolutely nothing to help me, to ask what to do. My mom, drowsy and still half asleep, actually giggled and said “give him some cheese and make friends.” Then she basically hung up.

It was at that point that I realized I was on my own. No parents, no boyfriend, no friends were going to run over in the middle of the night to save me from a mouse. It was just me. And my mouse.

I did google “renting a cat for mouse hunting,” but it turns out they don’t rent cats out for that purpose. (I’m more of a dog person anyway.)

Luckily, New York City is actually the easiest place in the world to be an adult. A 24-hour delivery service brought mouse traps to my door that very night. The mouse was never actually caught in them, which I am incredibly grateful for because the thought of picking him up to throw him away terrified me. Ultimately, my building super plugged up all the holes in my apartment with steel wool and the mouse never returned.

A few months later, I adopted a dog instead of the cat. So now it’s just me. And my dog. And we love living in the city where you never really have to be an adult—because you can hire someone else to be one for you.

Especially in the age of Seamless, Uber, Fresh Direct, Washio, Shyp, and all the other dodge-it-yourself apps, Tricia has a point. If you have your own unique story about becoming an adult in New York—a coming of age that could only happen in that city—let us know.

Our reader note about New Yorkers becoming adults made me think of a New York magazine essay by the late humorist David Rakoff, one of my favorite writers, about coming of age in New York City. He arrived there from Toronto as a college freshman in 1982:

It was what I took away from most every encounter: an almost obliterating desire to “pass” as a New Yorker, to authentically resemble one of the denizens of the movie Manhattan. More than the Deco penthouse aeries of characters in old musicals, more than the moral elasticity and heartless grit of backstage Broadway in All That Jazz, perhaps on par with the gin-swilling savagery of All About Eve, it was the city as embodied in Manhattan I ached for. The high-strung friends with terrible problems, the casual infidelities, the rarefied bohemianism—ERA fund-raisers in the garden at MoMA, gallery-hopping followed by filling one’s simple grocery list at Dean & DeLuca.

There was no one specific moment when the rigorous self-consciousness gave way to authenticity. It was more of a dim realization that the very act of playing the “Are we a New Yorker yet?” game means you aren’t one yet.

But it eventually happens, dawning on you after the fact, tapping you on the shoulder after you’ve passed it. It comes from an accretion of shitty jobs, deeply felt friendships that last, deeply felt friendships that end, funerals, marriages, divorces, births, and betrayals, and you wake up one day to realize that you passed the eight-year mark decades prior; that you are older than all of the characters in Manhattan, with the possible exception of Bella Abzug; that you have been to a party in the garden at MoMA and watched the sun come up over Sutton Place and the 59th Street Bridge and decided that, in the end, you’d rather stay home; that only a rich moron would buy his groceries at Dean & DeLuca; and that, as fun and Margo Channing as it might seem to be drunk and witty and cutting, it’s probably better in the long run to be kind.

These are all realizations endemic to aging anywhere, I am sure. It must happen in other cities, but I’ve really only ever been a grown-up here.

I was, like Rakoff, a transplant when I moved to New York in 2011. I spent four years there on the same college campus he had walked 30 years earlier. Now I live in Washington, D.C., and I’m unsure if I will ever cross his eight-year milestone in New York. But half that time was enough for me to understand what he meant.

I revisit Rakoff’s essay several times a year (in addition to this lovely tribute to his life), and its subtle brilliance is something I have only recently begun to untangle, perhaps with 200 miles of distance from his subject. He was writing as much about becoming a New Yorker as he was about becoming an adult. (These are all realizations endemic to aging anywhere. I’ve really only ever been a grown-up here.) Substitute “New Yorker” for “adult” and you’ll see what I mean:

[T]he very act of playing the “Are we an adult yet?” game means you aren’t one yet. But it eventually happens, dawning on you after the fact, tapping you on the shoulder after you’ve passed it. It comes from an accretion of shitty jobs, deeply felt friendships that last, deeply felt friendships that end, funerals, marriages, divorces, births, and betrayals.

I perform the material rites of adulthood now more than I did in college: I found my own housing, I pay bills, I cook meals, I go to work. It is tempting to locate “adulthood” in these activities, but I have come to believe that, as ambiguous a concept as adulthood is, and as imprecise as it is to try to sketch its features, to me adulthood means “rigorous self-consciousness giving way to authenticity.” And to a greater extent: “As fun and Margo Channing as it might seem to be drunk and witty and cutting, it’s probably better in the long run to be kind.”

I had countless New York moments to realize this, but here’s the one that stands out: One night I chose to meet two friends at a fancy bar on a rooftop in Manhattan rather than spend time with my childhood best friend visiting from the West Coast during the last few hours of his trip. He left hurt and angry. Around 3 in the morning, I took an uptown train back to campus. There were only four other people in the subway car, one of whom was playing the saxophone with a sense of manic joy I have not witnessed since. The five of us bonded over it, but a few stops later the car had emptied until I was alone, and I began to think regretfully about what I’d done.

Last week, our video team revived our long discussion thread on adulthood by producing a series of person-on-the-street interviews in Manhattan (re-embedded above). We still have a ton of your emails and are trying to post as many of the best ones as we can. One of the most common themes for the question “When did you become an adult?” is financial independence, namely from parents. Here’s reader Michelle, age 38:

Great question! I felt like an adult at age 26. For the earlier part of my twenties, I rarely lived at my family home, but I searched out opportunities to live for free—friends’ homes, non-profits that offered housing, jobs where you could live on-site. But at 26, I got a studio apartment in a big city and paid rent through my own efforts. Living alone for the first time was my entry into true adulthood; financial independence and self-knowledge occurred in those rocky but wonderful years.

Megan Von Bergen gets a bit more specific with her marker:

One of the first times I really felt like an adult was when I started paying my first utility bills, during graduate school. This was my very first apartment. Paying bills was something I’d seen my parents do, it was something I was never involved in, and so to take responsibility for a mundane task made me really feel like an adult.

Ironically, for the first few weeks, this made me really excited about paying bills.

Stephen Grapes, on the other hand, isn’t quite there yet:

I don’t think I’ve become an adult just yet. I’m a 21 year-old American student who lives almost entirely off of my parent’s welfare.

For the last several years, I’ve felt a pressure—it might be a biological or a social pressure—to get out from under the yoke of my parents’ financial assistance. I feel that only when I’m able to support myself financially will I be a true “adult.” Some of the traditional markers of adulthood (turning 18, turning 21) have come and gone without me feeling any more adult-y, and I don’t think that marriage would make me feel grown up unless it was accompanied by financial independence.

Money really matters, because past a certain age, it is the main determiner of what you can and cannot do. And I guess to me the freedom to choose all “the things” in your life is what makes someone an adult.

Here’s another thing from Lauren Oliver:

When are you an adult? When you make your own doctor appointment.

Yes, there are defining moments in life that will make you feel like an adult: having kids, owning a home, holding a steady job, marriage, or experiencing deaths of loved ones, divorce(s), and career loss. All of these experiences are part of an adult’s life. But what is an adult? An adult is when one has full responsibility for him/herself. Bills are paid by oneself, appointments are made by oneself, confirming holiday plans with family members is done by oneself. Once this occurs, in my opinion, is when one is an adult.

“It’s nice to feel comfortable in your own weirdness; it’s maybe even the most important thing.” That’s my favorite line in this reader roundup, from Tom Schroeder, a 25-year-old grad student:

I began considering myself an adult shortly after moving into my own one-bedroom apartment about a year ago, at the age of 24, roughly two years after becoming financially independent from my parents. This probably says a lot about my personality, but it wasn’t until I lived alone and felt full ownership over my living space that I felt comfortable forming healthy routines.

I finally began learning to cook, for example. I kept my apartment clean for once in my life. I began to feel like a competent host. I no longer dreaded coming home, because there was no longer the question of whether there’d be any roommates around that I’d have to justify my actions, schedule, or company to.

It’s nice to feel comfortable in your own weirdness; it’s maybe even the most important thing. It’s easier without witnesses.

I’ll be moving away soon, so I had to abandon my beloved apartment in the summer to find a temporary room in a house with some friends. It’s the best thing I could have found for my circumstances, but I feel myself backsliding—between having housemates and existing in a more or less transient state, I’m cooking less, avoiding my own home, and living more messily and less healthily.

In short, I feel less like an adult living here. But I now know what to look for so I can get back on track when I arrive in my new home.

One more reader, who prefers to remain anonymous:

When I was a child, I thought adulthood was when you went to college. You were “completely on your own.” You took the classes that you wanted, you made the friends that you wanted, you ate what you wanted. You were the only agent in your successes and infrequent failures. Besides, you were 18 years old—that was pretty old to a 9 year old. You had to have been smart and mature and nice at that point. You had to have been “grown up.”

When I entered college, I realized how woefully naive that idea was. I was supported by my parents since they paid my tuition as well as room and board. Without them, I would have nothing.

With that, I mentally crossed off the sole agent bit. The other bits would be crossed off one by one, as I met many people who weren’t very smart or mature or nice or “grown up” and I came to realize that doing whatever you wanted did not equate a sense of adulthood. Eating Subway sandwiches at 4 AM on a Tuesday night, drunk out of your mind, when you have an 8 AM class is not a roaring affirmation of your maturation.

When I was in graduate school, still being supported by my parents, I thought that having a job and living on your own made you an adult. Actually being responsible for your own day-to-day life had to have meant something. You truly were on your own. How much more grown up is that?

Now that I have a job and am getting closer to moving out of my parents’ house, I am coming to realize that there is closer of a truth in that idea. I do feel better and more “grown up” about myself handling the finances in my life. Except that there are all these technicalities that come with that sense of financial independence.

For example, the cellphone plan. Adults pay for their cellphone plan. Except … do adults stay in their family plan? By doing so, I pay $44 a month as opposed to about $100 for unlimited data, talking, and text. That’s some financial responsibility right there! Especially since it makes my parents’ cell phone plans cheaper as well. But after I pat myself on the back, I find it hard to ignore the feeling of embarrassment that my mommy takes money out of my checking account to pay for my cell phone every month. Is it better to pay more to get rid of my hot cheeks?

I know that it is a very Millennial thing to say (and thus unfashionable in certain circles), but I also don’t want my identity to be tied to money so closely. I had hoped my sense of adulthood would be connected to feelings rather than decimal points and commas in an online statement.

Am I an adult now? Who am I? I am 23 years old. I have a job. I am moving out soon to live with a significant other of nearly three years. I have two degrees and I am hoping to pursue a third. On paper, I am on the cusp of maturation. But I still am insecure. I over-analyze things to death and, while I argue that I am a realist, I am probably enormously pessimistic. I am anxious about small things and large things, and the gaps in my knowledge about basic things (still have not learned how to change a tire, how do I do taxes without an accountant, how do I know if I want children one day-oh God, the list is endless) deeply troubles me.

On a good day, I would say I am 60 percent of an adult. Since today is an okay day, so I am about 40-50 percent of the way there. At least I am making progress.

Our video team shot a charming video of short interviews on the streets of New York centered on the question, “How do you know when you’re a grown-up?”:

A reader who watched the video writes:

The “responsible for yourself” has it right. You don’t need to have kids, get married, buy a house, etc (though all that will certainly give you more responsibilities). Some people are 18-years old and grown up. Some are double/triple that age and haven’t reached it yet.

After I got married and had my first son, I thought I would start feeling like an adult. Then after I landed a dream job, bought a house, and relocated my family to a new town where we didn’t know anyone, I thought I would start feeling like an adult. Even after I had my second son three months ago, I kept waiting for the feeling to kick in.

Then the other day my eldest, almost four, watched an episode of Reading Rainbow about September 11.

I was sitting with him when I realized what was happening, and I froze. Do I tell him to turn it off? If so, do I tell him it’s because it’s inappropriate? Because he’s too young to know?

Instead, I just texted my husband, “Holy shit, Reading Rainbow is covering September 11” and let him watch it. [A clip from that episode is here.]

My son didn’t say much about it, and I wondered if it even made an impact. But the next day, as I helped him into his carseat on our way home from the library, he asked me why the planes crashed into the buildings. I started to make up a lie when I realized that’s not how I wanted to raise him. After all, we spoke about injustice and inequality when he asked about Martin Luther King, and we discussed women’s rights when he asked about Hillary Clinton.

So as I drove, I let him know that I would answer all of the questions that he had as best I could. I didn’t want to lie, knowing that he would eventually learn on his own and trust me less. So I carefully explained that not everyone likes what our country has done, that people did crash the plane into the buildings, that many people had to run out of the buildings, that people were very sad about what happened, and that it has not happened again.

He asked a few more questions, decided that people were upset that George Washington won the war (thanks, Hamilton soundtrack) and then we moved on to what dad was making for dinner. But in that moment of having to decide if and how to explain evil to my son, by permitting him to know that the world is full of confusion, that we are not innocent, and that tragedy is out there, I became an adult.

If you have a New York-specific moment marking your adulthood, let us know. When I was 22, recently out of college and living in a 70-square-foot room in Hell’s Kitchen, I remember being in the Empire State Building on my lunch break for a course I was taking on web design and realizing that I didn’t even have enough money to buy a slice of pizza—no cash, not enough money in my checking account to withdraw $20, and the cost of the pizza being too little to charge on my credit card. Talk about financial independence. We received many similar stories from readers discussing their own independence from their parents (though my own marker of adulthood wouldn’t come later), so we’ll air those soon.

Many readers have written in detailing how they didn’t truly become an adult until one or both of their parents died. Our first reader, Crystal, was a 20-year-old college student when tragedy struck:

On July 5, 1987, Mom called and told me Dad had died. My life changed dramatically after that, and I felt alone and vulnerable. My dad always helped me whenever I needed him—advice about guys, helping me move, fixing my car … he was always there.

We also shared a birthday on July 29th. I knew I was truly “on my own” when I celebrated the first birthday without him.

This reader was also 20 when his dad died:

I’m the youngest of five siblings and the only one who left home (at 18), never to return. When I lost my father, my uncle told me that “No boy can be a man while his father is alive.”

John Mason pinpoints the day his father passed away:

Sunday, March 16, 2014.

The process began on a Friday. I was home for Spring Break during my junior year, and my dad, Bill, was feeling a little under the weather. I didn’t think anything of it. But my mom insisted he go to the doctor, which was prescient and wise, but it didn’t matter in the end: He was diagnosed with cancer. Specifically it was a type of leukemia that to this day the doctors still cannot identify.

He passed that Sunday, as suddenly as he was diagnosed. We didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.

I say we, because my eight-year-old brother said between rivers of tears something I’ll never forget: “This is the saddest day of my life. I will never forget this day for the rest of my life.”

That was the day I became an adult, because that is the day I began to raise my brother alongside my mom. It wasn’t immediate; it was a process. Looking back, and looking at the parallel trajectories of my closest friends’ maturation, I notice some subtle and not-so-subtle differences in how we act. I tend to be on time more often, I think, because for me if I’m late, it means my brother stands alone in his school parking lot. I also think about money a lot more, because I had to take over my family’s finances immediately, deal with the will, and plan our family’s future. They rag on me for being so concerned about money, but how can I explain to them that money acts to help fill in as the shield for my family that my dad always was?

I’m more serious now. Perhaps that’s a part of my natural temperament, but nonetheless I take things more seriously in general. I’m more focused on trying to plan my career meticulously, so that I can have the control necessary to help raise my brother while also growing myself. And I think more about risks to myself and my family. I had a heavy dose of reality that day, of the fragility of life and of the need to plan for contingencies. We got lucky in that my father left us okay; we might not be so lucky next time.

Maybe it’s reality, in its infinite forms, that makes you an adult. It made me one.

Cynthia Pury became one after she lost her mom:

My dad died when I was 12, and my mother died when I was in college, so I became an adult shortly after her death. I remember sitting in my dorm room a few weeks after the funeral and realizing that all of my life’s choices were now being made by me and for me, without any supervision. If I shaved my head and wore spiked leather (it was the ‘80s), no one would care. If I dropped out of college, no one besides me would care. If I finished my degree and went to grad school, no one besides me would care.

It was both sad and liberating; I knew that anything I worked at would be because I wanted it.

Another reader, Christine, also lost her mom at a relatively young age:

I didn’t become an adult until after my mother died. My father had died when I was 18, and a lot of the milestones that mark adulthood followed his death. But it wasn’t until four years later when my mom died, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as my dad, that I truly became an adult.

The realization didn’t happen the moment that she died; it was actually a few months later, on Christmas morning. I was spending the holiday with my relatively new step-dad and his family. He had been married to my mom for only five months when she died.

That morning I came out of the guest bedroom and saw the Christmas tree lit up and was struck with the realization that nothing would ever be the same, and that no one would ever take care of me again. So I made breakfast for everyone, like my mom would have done, and came to terms with the real possibility that no one would make me breakfast on Christmas morning ever again. Coming to terms with such a thing represented the passage into adulthood for me.

Another reader:

I would say I’ve truly become an adult since the death of my mother six years ago, when I was 29. I rely entirely on myself now, since I have no family to consult about important things. I depend on experts (and the internet, let’s be real) to advise me and ultimately make decisions on my own. Being single, childless, and motherless has some perks and some disadvantages. Perk: No one tells me when I’m screwing up. Disadvantage: No one tells me when I’m screwing up.

One more reader, David Swider, lost his mother in an especially tragic way:

I grew up in a pretty typical set of 1960s and 1970s neighborhoods and turned 18 in 1976, right after graduating from high school. I was starting college the following January and figured that moment was when I was going to really enter adulthood. I was close, but not for any form of chronological event, but because of a change in my family.

I think it was right then that I became an adult—not because of the horrible event itself, but because up until then, I had been able to see myself as this individual. I had chores around the house, but I didn’t have any actual responsibility for the welfare of others.

My grandmother came out from Detroit for a few months to help us get situated, teaching me how to shop for groceries, how to cook, and how to manage a kitchen. She taught my brothers other items, but we all learned together and could do each others’ chores. But it was the obligation to be home from work or school to make dinner for my family and to ensure that everyone was well fed every day that made me realize that as adults, this is our obligation—to care for the welfare of others and to do something about it.

My brother is four years older than I am. When I was 13 and he was 17, he dove head-­first into drug and alcohol abuse. It all began simply enough, as apparently these things do. Most kids grow out of it. But what began as hidden packs of Marlboro Reds and vehement, nearly hysterical pleas that his eyes were only red because his contacts were dry, eventually turned into missing valuables, violent eruptions at the slightest provocation, court dates, lawyer’s fees, rehab, nights in jail, my mother driving around the streets with street dealers hoping desperately to find any sign of life.

But there was one pivotal night where I finally understood that this wasn’t just a phase my brother was going through.

The summer before my 15 birthday I spent most of my time at home holed up in my room, reading or writing or chatting with my friends on the now­-ancient AOL Instant Messenger. My brother had become verbally and physically abusive towards me any time he was around, because at 15 I had no money to give him and I wouldn’t let him steal anything else of mine for drug money.

I had become so angry about what he had turned my family into, about how sharply his behavior shined a light on my parents’ inability to say no to him and further inability to say yes to me. In my mind, I had asked them to keep me safe from him and, in their way, they told me that his safety (staying off the streets) was more important than mine (feeling safe in my own home, feeling safe from the social stigma he had caused me at school, feeling protected by my parents).

So, one balmy night I was listening to sad music and zoning out online when I heard a rumbling downstairs, like a thunderclap. I walked through the hallway and down the stairs and saw my brother, utterly inebriated, moving like a Frankenstein monster toward my father. He was carrying a broom handle and trying to hit my father like a piñata.

In his stupor, he missed. He flipped our kitchen table and its contents over on its side. He swung again. This time, my father, a Vietnam vet, wrenched the broom away from him and knocked him down with one punch. Then my father collapsed himself, down to his knees, clutching his heart.

God help me, I ran to my brother first. I leaned down to him and with breath bordering on smokey from the stench of Southern Comfort he said, “Krista, I’m sorry I ruined your life.”

A few feet away, my father wheezed and heaved and I ran to him, frenziedly trying to understand what happened. But I knew what had happened. My brother came home piss drunk at 19 and my father had tried to be a parent about it. In turn, my brother got violent, and in order to save us from him, my dad did something he had never wanted to do, something which had been done to him countless times: He hit his son.

Within seconds, my mother, who had somehow missed the shouting match, the table flip, and two labored thuds, flew down the stairs screaming. She called the police. I stuck around while arrogant local cops asked me condescending questions and took my brother away.

When it was finally just my parents and me, I put on my shoes, grabbed my school bag, and without any words I walked a mile down the road to my best friend’s house. She and her parents gave me big hugs and put me to bed without asking any questions.

The next morning, I knew it was over. I may not have felt like an adult yet, but I knew I wasn’t a kid anymore.

I was 18, in my freshman year of college. My father had been killed in an auto accident three years prior and our family was suing the insurance company of the driver who hit him. There were a lot of mysteries surrounding the circumstances of the accident—mysteries that the defense would certainly use to poke holes in our case—and our lawyer thought it was important to our success that we paint a picture of the man, a picture independent of that fateful night.

The trial was to take place during spring break. Needless to say, I could not have been looking forward to my break less. I spent the train ride to Philadelphia silently cursing my friends who were headed off to warmer and more pleasurable pastures, wondering why my mom was burdening me with testifying on my father’s behalf for a stupid tragedy from which we had since recovered.

On the first day of the trial, I had spent the better part of the morning in the back of the room listening to the testimony of a series of witnesses and forensic experts. By the time we broke for lunch, I had concluded that we didn’t exactly have a lock on the win, in no small part due to the tenacity of the defense attorney. But I had seen enough episodes of LA Law to know this was just business.

At 2:00, I was called to the witness stand. Our lawyer asked the first question and I dutifully launched into a rehearsed soliloquy about how loving and supportive my father was: how he built me a tree house from scraps when I was seven, how he taught me to drive a stick at 12, how we shared a daily breakfast ritual during the school week.

It was while I was talking about our mutual love of fried eggs that I realized I was sobbing. The frozen recollections that I had impassively recounted myriad times in our lawyer’s office had somehow defrosted into clear and profound memories, and suddenly the emotions that I had been stifling for three years were streaming onto my face. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to flee from the courtroom.

The judge had us pause, handing me a tissue. As I wiped my eyes I noticed that the defendant’s attorney was crouched beside his client talking at him more animatedly than I had seen him all day. He kept looking over his shoulder at the jury, who were regarding me through collectively concerned eyes. When he put his hand up to indicate to the judge that he needed a few minutes, it suddenly hit me that the defense was going to settle.

Everything came into focus. I finally comprehended that the point of my testimony was not simply to tell stories about my father, but to humanize him in the eyes of the jury. What’s more, my participation was so much bigger than simply helping us win the case; it was helping my mom secure a future for what was left of our family. In other words, it was business for us, too.

And the mere fact that I had had this insight made me realize right then that I was an adult.

I was 15 when I moved schools, moved countries, moved continents, to a place where I was deemed a stranger, an outsider, unwanted. Specifically, I went from Cairo, Egypt, to a little Canadian town in Ontario called London. And in that move, I found my voice and my strength. I was unable to hide in the crowd and just be a face in the hallways. I became a spokesperson for my faith, my people and myself. It was terrifying but most liberating.

I like to think an “adult” cannot be defined in superficial terms, but rather the characteristics a person embodies. I believe a person becomes an adult when they are capable of holding opinions that may be deemed unpopular or controversial, but they have enough conviction and self determination to stand by those opinions.

If you have your own immigrant experience to share, drop us an email. From another reader, Mohammad:

My dad’s story appears to me as something unique and profound, but the truth is, it’s a very common American story.

Born and raised poor overseas, he worked his way through medical school in his homeland before telling his wife and newborn son to wait while he came to the United States in search of a better world for both his old and new families. There is a litany of aspects of my father’s life I find great poetry in, but one of my favorite is the fact that when he first moved to the U.S., when he couldn’t find a residency, he found a job in and moved to a city named Man, West Virginia.

I was born four years later in the Midwest. I was your average kid, with the exception that all popular culture and social integration I learned was self-taught. My parents were learning about it the same time I was, so I had to provide my own context. I learned about things like music, sports, girls, social interaction, even language to a degree, on my own.

One thing that was inherited from my dad, however, was a deep love of knowledge, specifically of news and world events. My very earliest memories of my father involve him coming home from work and sitting down on the couch to watch the national news broadcast, followed immediately by the Newshour on PBS. This didn’t change for many years, and along with some of my other social impediments, it helped me turn into the oldest 14 year old you’ve ever met. I was far more comfortable in a room full of adults discussing politics and news (and occasionally trying to chime in) than I was playing with kids in my own peer group. Even as I got a littler older, I held a deeply held view that education, getting a job, and getting married were paramount to a happy life.

So to answer the question honestly, I first felt like an adult around the age of 16.

Somewhere in the decade that followed, however, I had a pretty big reversion to the mean. My child-like wonder and idealism grew as the “responsible” decision making discarded risk aversion and embraced ideas like regular Kerouac-esque road tripping around the country just for the kicks and not worrying about words like “career path.” I gave the adult in me away and felt very much like a child, with all its benefits and denotations.

Three years ago, my father, my hero and role model in life, was diagnosed with very late stage pancreatic cancer. I was seated next to him in the hospital room when the oncologist came in and delivered the news and presented possible treatment options. Knowing the risk/reward proposition very well, my father stoically nodded and said he’d prefer to just go home and be with his family.

In the five or so weeks between that and when he passed away, I witnessed both beautiful and horrible things. I saw a man knowing his life was ending, and taking it with a grace I don’t think I’ll ever have the strength for. I moved in with my parents and, despite not being a doctor, served as his health provider, carrying out his medical orders. When he died, it was with all of his family by his side.

Reading “watching my father die” sounds horrific, but it wasn’t. Like everything else in his life, he approached it with an optimist and gravitas that brought comfort to everyone around him. It was certainly painful, but it was also poetic and reassuring to think of how beautiful a life he lived.

Being a child or an adult is not a binary function. Rather, it’s an ebb and flow, a scale that is re-calibrated on a regular basis. Losing my father was the most difficult thing I have ever experienced and certainly made me an adult in so many ways. However, it also reminded me of the brevity in humanity, and to maintain childish behaviors. The fact that time passes and I should both enjoy it and make it count is perhaps the most adult lesson there is.

One of our previous readers was left alone by her parents as a teenager to care for her younger sister. Two more readers were basically abandoned after their parents divorced. Here’s the first:

This may be kind of a sad story, but I’m sure it won’t be the only sad one you’ll be getting. I’m now 37 years old, homeowner, wife, Registered Nurse, mother to a three year old and a two month old—all adult things. But I think I became an adult when I was 15.

My parents separated when I was 14 and I moved from a very rural area to a small town about 70 miles away. I went from a tiny rural school with seven kids in my grade level to a high school with about 300 kids in my grade. I was shy, or perhaps “slow to warm up” to new situations, as I still am today.

A year after their separation, my parents announced that they were getting divorced. I was told by my dad when I woke up one morning to the two of them arguing. When I got up for school that morning I remember asking, “What’s going on?,” and my dad saying angrily, “Your mom and I are getting a divorce and I’m going to treatment.” I was then expected to get ready for school as usual.

My dad went through an in-patient alcohol treatment program for 30 days shortly thereafter. I met my first boyfriend that school year, too, after the treatment and the divorce were underway. My mom, rather than talk to me about how I was feeling herself, sent me to a counselor. I quickly learned to tell this professional what she wanted to hear.

As far as the boyfriend, I had never even kissed anyone, and we quickly started spending a lot of time driving around in his little sports car and making out. We had sex for the first time just four months after we started dating, and we used a condom … but I was scared out of my mind about being pregnant. I decided to talk to my mom about it. I asked her, “You think I’m grown up enough to make my own decisions, right?” She looked sidelong at me. I proceeded to tell her that I had had sex with my boyfriend and we used a condom. She tried to awkwardly make a joke by asking, “Was it (the condom) blue?” I was mortified and immediately regretted telling her anything.

But I was smart enough to know that the possibility of pregnancy was a real one, and shortly thereafter I asked her again to take me to the doctor to talk about birth control options. She said, “I think that putting teenagers on birth control just makes them think they have permission to have sex.” Again, mortified.

Throughout the rest of my relationship with this boyfriend (a few more months), my mother would ask me angrily, “So what do you two do when you go out driving in his car?” and say things to me like, “If you get pregnant, I’m not going to help you take care of that baby.”

I was smart and assertive enough, though, to use a condom every time and never had an unplanned pregnancy. However, it was that year that I realized I was on my own. It wasn’t safe to confide in my mother and my father—he was, well, barely past the emotional level of a teenager at that point. That’s when I became an adult: When I realized no one was going to protect me but myself.

This reader’s parents were even more absent:

I became an adult when I was 16 and my parents split up. They are both drank excessively for the next several years and I had to take care of myself. I moved in with my older sister and I got a fast food job, which I worked 30 hours a week in order to pay for my necessities. I got health care at Planned Parenthood. I put off all dental work until I graduated college, because I had no dental insurance, but brushed my teeth carefully to try to avoid needing it. I realized I was having trouble seeing by senior year, so I saved up for some glasses out of my own paycheck. I was exhausted all of the time, because I had to keep doing well in school and keep up with my extracurriculars (which I also paid for) so that I could get scholarships to a good school where I could live on campus.

Being an adult at 16 and 17 was difficult, because colleges I was interested in attending took a lot of convincing that I should be considered an adult for their purposes, but legally, I was advised that I was too old for pursuing emancipation. Through the hard work of a really great guidance counselor, I did get to apply to college independently and got into a prestigious liberal arts college.

What made being an adult so young easier was the support of friends and teachers, and the fact that in my Midwestern high school I was not the only person taking on the responsibilities of adulthood early. There were young men and women with children in my class, another honors student spent her senior year pregnant, and a large number of people got married and/or had children within two years of graduating. One close friend was in prison by the time he was 20. And most of us had jobs throughout high school. Overall, we were a group of people genuinely on the cusp of adulthood, with both its joys and its sorrows.

Being an adult from 18-22 at a prestigious liberal arts college was harder. Most of the students around me did not act like adults, and plenty told me they did not feel like adults. Everything about the college was set up to serve students who had a supportive family ready and able to fly them home for every break. I still remember making myself sick eating macaroni and cheese and ramen for seven days of Thanksgiving break because the dining halls were closed and I had no kitchen in which to cook. Even with scholarships, I couldn’t live on my work study job (which could only give me eight hours/week), so I had a second job for the last two years of college. And I felt isolated by my experience on a campus where students who couldn’t figure out how to buy stamps on their own would make fun of my friends back home for getting married at 19. (Those friends are still happily married, 14 years later.)

Now in my early thirties, I have some of the trappings of middle-class adult life: I’m married, I have an advanced degree, a career, a bank account. Home-ownership is only frustratingly out of reach right now, instead of ludicrously implausible. To many eyes, I look like an adult now. But I was an adult then.

If you are wondering, I don’t feel as though I missed out on anything. I still had fun and friends. And, as much as I sometimes felt sad or resentful that there wasn’t a safety net beneath me if I flunked out of college, I mostly felt sorry for my friends who confessed that they did not feel like adults. They seemed unsure of themselves. Some asked their parents permission before getting a haircut, or deciding on a major. I really think I would have chafed at the lack of freedom.

I wish the circumstance had been happier, but I did not feel personally unready for adulthood at 16. As my husband and I prepare to have children of our own, a question on our mind is, “How do we instill the sense of self-reliance and resilience we felt as young adults in our own children, without the literal abandonment we both experienced?”

Update from a reader with a somewhat similar story:

I became an adult when I was 16. My parents separated when I was 14, and over the course of the next 18 months my mother moved across the country to live with her parents, my older brother went to college, and my father got a job in a city two hours away, so he lived there from Monday through Friday.

I don’t have a great recollection of how long this lasted or the exact details of the arrangement, but I remember there was always food in the house and some cash in a bag in the freezer. My father came home on the weekends and sometimes on one weeknight, but that was mostly to go to his match at the local tennis league. I recall feeling distinctly like I could no longer rely on anyone but myself from that point on. I bought most of my clothes at charity thrift stores and limited the number my college tests and applications because I couldn’t afford to pay for more.

The strange thing is that I don’t think I realized how wrong the situation was until about ten years later. When I was in my late 20s my best friend’s mother told me she was appalled by what happened and that she considered stepping in but held off because I seemed to be keeping things together and I spent enough time at her house that she could keep an eye on me there. After I went to college, the house I had lived in was sold and I haven’t felt like I’ve had a “childhood home” since then, except maybe at my best friend’s mom’s house.

I’m 35 now and married with two kids. I own my own home, have a professional degree and career, and I think the things that kept me from flying off the rails were my friends’ parents looking out for me, the sports teams I was on, and determination I found after realizing that I had nobody but myself to catch me if I fell.

I had not yet menstruated, not yet become a woman, but I was an adult. And there was no question in my mind that it should be reported. The responding police officer accused me of making it up. He made jokes. He implied that me wearing a pair of shorts inside my own house had seduced the rapist. When I forgot that I’d met the man once, briefly, then remembered, the officer used that to imply that I was lying. The officer had to be kicked out of the examination room during the rape kit because he made jokes about my lack of pubic hair. When I picked the rapist out of a photo lineup, he sabotaged the photo lineup. When I found out that this man had raped two other girls my age from the neighborhood, I understood why they did not report to the police.

In those days, it was standard for any rape victim to be blamed for the crime, no matter what the circumstances. The prank calls and slurs I would endure from neighbors and other kids and their parents were a defense mechanism, a way for them to convince themselves that their children won’t be raped as long as they aren’t slutty (which I must have been) or had the right parents (which I must not have had) or attended church regularly (which I did not). Victim-blaming is easier for most people than thinking that it could happen to them.

I was an adult when I realized that the only sense of justice I could trust in this world was my own. I vowed that I would use my voice to make up for those other two girls whose families told them to keep quiet.

In my high school, girls were date-raped often, but they could convince themselves it wasn’t really rape because they were wearing the wrong clothes or drank a beer or didn’t get their own ride. I remember three of the popular girls discussing how they didn’t want to go to a party that weekend because they were still healing from their last unwilling encounter, but they were resigned to the inevitably that sex was not their choice to make. Surely they’d learned as much from their parents’ reactions to my “scandal.” These girls could (and did) spit on me during the day, and then lean on my shoulder after school because I was the only one who was publicly identifiable as a survivor. I was different in a bad way as far as they were concerned, but having to rely on my own sense of fairness and compassion because I found almost none in my town made me stronger than those who fit in. By listening to and empathizing with my bullies in those secret sessions, I hoped to lend some of that strength to them.

In college I took academic work related to sexual assault, particularly the prosecution of rape as a war crime. Not that I was ever a leader in that fight, but it takes a lot of people to form a movement. I spoke at Take Back The Night. I’ve done a lot of other things professionally; sexual assault hasn’t taken over my life. I do struggle with PTSD (mostly from something else, not from the rape). So mine is not a neat linear tale of recovery, but a story of how strength comes from a lot of different places. I am unapologetically and publicly a survivor of a rape, and since the moment I felt his hands grab me, I knew I would neither capitulate nor retreat. Not inside, and not to a rapist, not to a badge, and not to a slew of cowardly victim-blaming phone calls.

I was raped on July 20th, 1987.
I was married on July 20th, 2002.

We could have chosen any date, any year. I’ve planted a flag on that date and redefined it. I took July 20th from my rapist and gave it to someone far more deserving. I have a fantastic husband who loves me for all my faults, just as I love him for his. We had happily been living in sin since high school. He had to grow up too fast as well, and maybe we wouldn’t have found each other if not for that.

I’m not fully an adult, and I’ll be damned if I ever consent to becoming one. But standing on my own two legs during a time when everyone seemed to judge what once happened between them was the major formative event in my life. For all its ups and downs, I like my life. I am secure in it. If I want to look like a fool crawling on my belly chasing after a bug with my camera, I will. If I want to be overjoyed at simple pleasures, I will. If I want to follow my bliss professionally, I’m blissful. Call me childish, because I’ve been called worse in the course of that one adult moment. The ways in which I am an adult enable all the ways in which I refuse to fully become one.

I was really jazzed to make and eat a beet salad one day—luscious beets, crunchy walnuts, and sweet cranberries on a bed of baby spinach drizzled with balsamic vinegar and oil. The realization hit me as I took my first bite: I was, quite officially, an adult. Non-adults simply don’t get excited about beet salads. By this point, I had blown by several adultish milestones without feeling like an adult: I had earned a PhD, lived with someone whom I referred to as my “partner,” paid bills and taxes, and took care of a dog. It wasn't until I felt that excitement for that beet salad, however, that I knew I had become adult.

Several readers answered the adulthood question by recalling the time they had to become a caretaker for someone who once raised them. Here’s Kate Hutton:

I’m steadily approaching 28, and I thought I was an adult when I got my first “real” job—salary, benefits, a commute to complain about—at 25. Turns out I was wrong. I don’t think I was truly an adult until I had to take care of my parents. Moving back in with my mom to help her through a new disability, staying by my father’s side through a week at the hospital, burying him unexpectedly—all in the span of a few months. You do a lot of growing up when you transition from being taken care of to a caretaker.

Another reader prefers that we “please post this anonymously so as to preserve my father’s privacy.” She recalls a grisly experience:

I think that I finally became an adult when my dad got very sick last year, when I was 25.

Previously, I had been through college, graduate school, and my first year of full-time employment and lived on my own. I had always paid my own bills and been generally self-supporting, but I relied on my parents a lot for emotional support and help with daily things, like knowing when to take my car to the mechanic or how to deal with difficult landlords. I suffer with a lot of anxiety, so I’ve been pretty emotionally needy at times.

I moved back in with my parents for a few months while I looked for an apartment. During this time, my dad—who had generally been in denial about his diabetes despite desperate pleas for him to seek medical care—took a turn for the worse. He burned his foot on a space heater, and the sore (which he kept hidden from us) slowly worsened from sore to infection to gangrene. The smell of his foot became unbearable and we realized how truly ill he was. We soon realized what was going on despite his secrecy and begged him to go to the doctor, but he violently refused.

Then one night I came downstairs and he was shivering so badly he couldn’t speak in complete phrases. I’ve never seen someone so ill in my life. It was so raw and horrific that I felt like he was slipping away as I watched. The instinct of “I need a real adult to handle this situation” kicked in, so I went to find my mother, but I soon realized that she needed me as much as I needed her. She too was paralyzed by his anger and our own fear for his life. We joined forces, begging, threatening, and bargaining with him to go to the hospital.

After an hour of screaming (between shivers and gasps), he caved in and agreed to go to the hospital. When he finally arrived, he had a temperature of 105. He was diagnosed with sepsis from the gangrene and part of his foot was amputated.

In the months that followed, he still resisted many lifestyle changes that doctors asked him to make. My mother and I had to present a united front and often had to fight with both my father and his doctors. For the first time, I realized that my parents were not in a position to handle my trivial emotional, physical, and lifestyle baggage, and so I wanted to protect them from it. I finally felt like whatever happened in my life was my own problem to solve, and also that I was capable of handling it.

Luckily my father has since recovered and my parents are doing okay again, but something in me changed that night. I handle my own issues to a much greater extent. I’ve since moved out and purchased my own home. I don’t feel like an “emerging adult” anymore; I’ve become a full adult.

A 53-year-old reader shares the “one moment that stands out in my mind” about becoming a true adult:

It was around 2009, when my mother had to move from one assisted living facility to another. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s at the time, so in a nutshell, I had to lie to her to get her in the car. The new facility had a lock-down unit, which was then the only practical option for her. It was not the first time I had told her a “white lie” in order to get her to do something, the way you might tell a child. But it was the only time I can recall when she realized I had lied to her, tricking her into leaving her apartment. She gave me a look of realization that I will never forget.

I was once married but never had children. I suppose if I had ever had children, I would have “become an adult” at some point during the parenting experience. Maybe there are certain “micro-betrayals” that go along with being responsible for someone. I don’t know. I prefer to remain ignorant about that.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

This article is from the archive of our partner .

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.